


The Taste of Salt

by Antimonicacid



Series: Sylvain's Therapy Log [3]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Haunting, Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:54:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28491231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Antimonicacid/pseuds/Antimonicacid
Summary: He showers. He combs the grime from his hair and picks the blood out from under his fingernails. He sends his armor to be cleaned. He throws the clothes he was wearing into the fire and watches them turn to ash. His boots are at the bottom of the lake. The lance that dealt the finishing blow dropped in the woods on their trek back to the monastery.There is nothing to memorialize the murder of Miklan Gautier.There is only Sylvain.The next day Sylvain asks the Archbishop to leave the Lance of Ruin in his care.It’s returned with blood still flaked on the handle.
Series: Sylvain's Therapy Log [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1804330
Comments: 2
Kudos: 47





	The Taste of Salt

**Author's Note:**

> Sylvain's a lil haunted

_i._

_blood_

Sylvain is twenty and the blood isn’t just on his hands, it’s dripping from his hair, it’s seeping into his shoes.

He’s banged up and bruised. Every gasp is a wince and every blink a plea for sleep.

The battle is over. He knows this, he does, but his muscles are a tight coil of preparation. The goose pimples lining his arms refusing to give up their alert.

Another enemy. Another fight. Another blow that can come from any and all direction.

It isn’t over. Sylvain has years and years of experience that tells him it isn’t over.

The ground fades away. The feeling of his lance in hand, the murmurs of his classmates, the smell of singed beastly flesh. It all fades away and Sylvain is standing there alone with his brother’s corpse. 

-

He showers. He combs the grime from his hair and picks the blood out from under his fingernails. He sends his armor to be cleaned. He throws the clothes he was wearing into the fire and watches them turn to ash. His boots are at the bottom of the lake. The lance that dealt the finishing blow dropped in the woods on their trek back to the monastery.

There is nothing to memorialize the murder of Miklan Gautier.

There is only Sylvain.

The next day Sylvain asks the Archbishop to leave the Lance of Ruin in his care.

It’s returned with blood still flaked on the handle.

-

Sylvain has killed before. He listened to the horror of his classmates’ first kills and he couldn’t distinguish envy from pity.

Sylvain has killed before, because that’s what he was born for. To defend the Gautier house. To protect Faerghus from the outside. To be the stage which war is played upon.

He was fourteen when his father began to take him along when squashing border skirmishes.

“You’ll only be running supplies back and forth,” his father assured him.

Sylvain had nodded and knew it was a lie.

And when the enemy had charged at him with an axe raised high and a yell that ripped through the battlefield, Sylvain wasn’t surprised to see his father look away.

_If you want to learn how to swim, then jump into the deep end._

There was no hesitation when Sylvain dodged out of the way. There was no tremble in his hands as he pushed his lance through the enemy’s side. He didn’t wonder how a man old enough to be his father could stomach the idea of attacking a child. He assessed. He reacted. He finished the job.

It wasn’t until hours later that what he had done sunk in.

Death. It clung to Sylvain in more ways than one.

-

Sylvain buries his face between a girl’s legs and tries to block out the noise of her voice. He doesn’t mind it when they moan. The sound of the Goddess’ name escaping a girl’s lips is always a nice boost to the ego. He doesn’t mind it when they pull his hair either. When they hold his head down and tighten their thighs into a vice grip until he is drowning just as much she is screaming.

But he hates it when they cry his name.

“Shhh shhh, baby,” Sylvain hushes her for the third time. “You’ll wake up the whole dorm like that.”

She whimpers and lays back with her hand covering her mouth. Tiny groans escape in muffled bursts.

Sylvain readjusts her legs resting on his shoulders and continues. He hums happily when a hand is fisted in his hair, but that bliss only lasts for a few seconds.

“Goddess, Sylvain– Oh, _ah!_ Sylvain, I love you. Oh, Sylvain I love you I love you I–“

Sylvain tunes her out while trying to finish this as quickly as he can.

-

“Do you want to…”

“No, I’m fine.”

“But you didn’t even–“

“Baby, making you feel good is all I care about. There’s time. I’ll see you tomorrow, alright?”

“Okay… I’ll see you tomorrow… Love you.”

“I love you too, baby.”

-

He hates it when girls lie. Maybe it’s not on purpose, he can admit that. Maybe there’s a part of them that lives naïve and dense, it convinces them of affection that’s just not there. It makes his blood boil. It makes his head throb.

And maybe he lies back, his currency of choice broken promises and carefully woven omission of words, but there are worse things in the world. There are worse people. Worse lies. Worse fates than to be unlucky enough to entangle oneself with the likes of Sylvain Gautier.

He can hear the gaps in the stories whichever latest girl spins to him. There’s an absence of emotion. Tiny cracks that Sylvain can’t help but dig his fingers in and pry open.

 _I love you_. But they don’t even know him.

 _I want you._ But it’s not him, it’s his crest.

 _I won’t hurt you._ Nobody can hold true to an impossible promise.

So, Sylvain lies back. He manipulates and he cheats. He plays the game with skill. He plays the game with the intent to win.

-

Sylvain hates it when girls cry. He doesn’t do it on purpose, it breaks his heart when he has to end things with a girl he likes, but it’s not always possible to avoid. When the tears start to fall, there’s not much that he can do.

“You are such a dickhead,” Felix says leaning against the doorframe.

Sylvain holds back a sigh as he turns to face him. “It’s not nice to spy,” he chastises.

Felix's face crinkles into a look of disgust. He scowls, his eyebrows creased as he squints at Sylvain. It’s the “I don’t know why I’m friends with you” look.

Felix doesn’t say that, though. He just repeats himself once again. “You’re such a dickhead.” A simple truth of the world.

It kinda stings. It’s different from Felix’s usual insults and bad attitude. There isn’t malice in his voice, and barely any disappointment either. Resignation. Felix knows how he is.

“Well,” Sylvain says as he crosses the room. “If that’s the only thing you came here to tell me, then consider the message received.” He keeps his voice light, there’s a smile on his face as he starts to ease his door close on his childhood friend.

“No,” Felix crosses his arms. “That was all. Have you considered being less of a dickhead?”

Sylvain closes the door.

_ii._

_salt_

The nightmares that cloud Sylvain’s mind are an intimate acquaintance, they flow a gentle stream alongside the rest of his blood. Vignettes of dark spaces and damp clothing, narrow hallways and fretful cries. They weave tendrils of terror into lattice shapes behind his eyes.

The vague structure of his dreams shift after Miklan’s death. Incomplete scenarios of violence and fear transform into something more tangible.

At night he ascends a tower that seems to have no end. With each step the distant roar of beasts draw closer, and as he moves forward the scent of sea salt floods his mind. Everything is damp, it leaves the walls sheening in the filtered moonlight, and his boots slick against stone stairs.

The moonlight is important. That means there is an end. An eventual stopping point which cherishes the sky and allows her glow to light his path.

There is an end. He repeats the logic in his head. There is an end. He has to be almost there.

It’s when he can see the top of the stairs beckoning him to his destination, that the woman grabs him by the ankle and pulls.

-

Glenn was always the one who would take charge of narrating scary stories at night. He’d hear them from his father or the elder knights he’d train with. Tales of demons who stalk you through the city’s streets and ghosts that sink their nails into the flesh of your neck. It’d terrify Felix and the rest of them, but Sylvain rarely thought more of it past the story's conclusion.

There was one that clung to him throughout the years. A folklore passed from one generation to the next.

The apparition of a woman who’d hunt the damned. On hands and knees she’d crawl, unrelenting in her pursuit towards those who dare to spill the blood of their own kin.

As a child, Sylvain would think of her on occasion. She served as a reminder that if he were to die then it would not be without vengeance. Now it was just a sick irony that made his stomach curl into fits of laughter.

She fills his dreams as an adult. It follows the same pattern.

Her pallor skin barely out of reach, he can see the reflection of it in the corner of his eye, but never more. Her presence is constant, it clouds his lungs along with the brine of an unseen sea, but he can’t turn around to face her. He can only move forward.

It isn’t until the last second of his ascent that she launches her attack. Spindly fingers grip his leg in a grasp cold enough to burn, an unmovable weight that pulls him down, he has no choice but to follow.

As he falls is when he’s allowed to look. His body twists around, and for a brief second, he can see hollow black eyes that have no bottom pleading to him. Desperate. Begging.

In the early mornings of Garreg Mach, Sylvain lays panting in bed, his sheets stiff with dried salt.

-

If Sylvain’s to be haunted, then so fucking what? What difference does it make in his life if his dreams were now filled with things otherworldly? He pushes the ghost out of his mind and continues on with his life as if nothing is wrong, because nothing is wrong. A bit of lost sleep and some probable trauma never hurt anyone, right?

The town girl from the other night no longer holds his attention, and he improvises with the excuse that he needs something to relax. So, he finds a new bar, flirts with someone else, and casts aside the thoughts of afterlife and punishment.

And it works. Long enough to strip her free of clothes. Long enough to fall into bed. Long enough to make her come so he can finish lazy and alone by her side.

He’s not fond of girls staying the night, but his exhaustion pulls him to sleep minutes later.

The next time Sylvain wakes up he is drowning. He jerks from his sleep with his chest heavy and burning, unable to breathe and barely aware of where he is. He doesn’t register his body hitting the floor, or the terrified cry as he wakes his sleeping partner.

The only thing he can hear, the only thing he can see or smell or feel, is the torrents of salt water bursting past his lips as he struggles to expunge the sea from his lungs.

-

When he sleeps, Sylvain dreams of the sun. Most winters in Gautier are cast in shades of damp grays and lengthened nights. Still, there are the rare days that the sun will shyly emerge.

He’s a child who likes to lay by the foyer window on sunny days. He lets the sunbeams break against the stained glass and mask his skin in a kaleidoscope of colors. With greedy abandon he soaks it up, thinking that there is something magical in light, that it will charge him with a new potential.

He dreams of that warmth, of lazy afternoons where the winter forbade much work from being done, and the simplicity of a boy’s wishes.

When he lifts his hand and stretches his arm forward, he can see the way the light bends between his fingers in swaths of red, blue, green, and yellow. It doesn’t hold still, instead it bends and dances as it pleases, mimicking the ghost of an untouched flame. It’s artwork. It’s a collaboration between himself and nature. He paints his palm with a mosaic of colors, and within it is a tribute to the sun herself.

_iii._

_ash_

It takes Sylvain a few days to work up the energy to hike his way to Conrad Tower. He receives permission from the professor without much effort; apparently being haunted is considered a good enough excuse to miss class. The steps through the tower aren’t just familiar, they’re nostalgic, each one taken a thousand times before in an endless cycle of unrelenting dreams. His breath, his heartbeat, the feeling of sweat slick against his back hold him firm in the reality he’s experiencing.

It’s not pitch dark like his nightmares are. The glow of his lance guides him forward.

Eventually, he reaches the top. Clean up after battle had never been anyone’s strong suit, and there is still the wreckage of discarded weapons strewn about. Whatever blood had been spilled had been washed away, but its erasure is imperfect.

What Miklan had bled wasn’t human. It remains a stubborn stain in the center of the stone floor. A black shadow that leaves the ground cold to the touch.

Sylvain doesn’t know his purpose here. He hadn’t thought that far ahead. He lays himself onto the ground, wrapped in the embrace of his brother’s death, and waits for sleep to take him.

-

Damp strands of hair tickle his face, but Sylvain doesn’t dare to open his eyes. What was once a hard stone below him has disappeared into a cold embrace. Water surrounds him from all sides, but he doesn’t choke. He doesn’t squirm. 

He feels the spider-like trail of fingers crawl up his neck, pulling him by the jaw and forcing him to turn and look. Sea salt burns his vision, but it’s background noise to the pits of grief staring into him.

The woman holding him captive isn’t human, or maybe she once was. Her hair splays in swirls of black, curling around his arms, his torso, and his neck. Her face is gaunt, her cheekbones glacial sharp and her lips a cracked, thin blue.

Sylvain doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know how to apologize. He wants to tell her he’s sorry. That he’s here to give repentance for the murder of his brother. But the apology burns hot in his chest. A lie he knows he has no hope of telling, turning his mouth into ash and embers.

The hold on his body tightens. The woman draws closer. Her mouth drips black, an ever-widening maw that sucks in the sea around them and pulls Sylvain near.

 _I’m not sorry,_ he doesn’t speak, but he knows she can hear. He shuts his eyes and holds his breath. _I’m not sorry for killing him. I wish I’d done it sooner._

Sylvain Gautier. The spoiled son of nobles. The killer of brothers.

And he doesn’t even have the decency to feel bad for it.

Pain doesn’t follow his admittance. At first, he doesn’t recognize the sensation, it’s too out of place in this nightmare situation, but then the familiarity settles in.

The faint touch of lips against his own. The blooming warmth of a chaste kiss. It almost feels like safety.

-

When Sylvain wakes, it’s to the familiar act of drowning. He tosses furiously in the water that engulfs him, fear overriding his instinct to swim for a second before something snaps into place. He kicks towards what he hopes is the surface. His lungs tight and air dwindling. The relief he feels when he finally breeches free is immense, and he gulps down greedy mouthfuls of air in ugly gasps.

He is alive. Once again, Sylvain is alive.

There isn’t relief that follows that realization. A bit of pride maybe. A stubborn, delicate pride for making it this far.

Sylvain counts to ten and closes his eyes before diving back under to fish for the soft glow of his horrible relic.

-

His dreams stop smelling of a seaport. He no longer walks an endless march to the top of Conrad tower, waiting for slaughter.

The loss of haunting is an ache he doesn’t expect. He wonders if he should have left the Lance of Ruin to drown.

-

His new date has a giggle that irritates him to no end. She plays with his hair when she speaks. When she touches his neck it makes him flinch, and when she asks why he lies easily.

“Your touch is just so electric, baby.”

It makes his mouth taste of coal. 

**Author's Note:**

> My twitter can be found [here!](https://twitter.com/biheretic?s=20)   
> Comments or questions are always nice! My curiouscat is also Biheretic!!


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